A self-constructing "0E0P" Conway's Life metacell is finally in working order!
The structure behaves like a single cell, obeying the rules of Life or whatever CA rule it's programmed to emulate. Unlike previous metacells, if a new cell has to be born, one of its neighbor metacells has to construct it starting from empty space.
While making interesting constructs in cellular automata is a fun exercise, there is the possibility that the constructs might be useful in the real world. In the near term, it is much easier to make a molecular scale cellular automata than it is to make a conventional processor. The latter requires a complicated means of stitching together molecules, the former is a crystal which is much simpler to make. So a molecular cellular automata could potentially enable us to make a computer with a mole quantity of logic gates, but we need some way to program said computer. All this work in cellular automata constructs provides a way to do this. Although the more likely application of such molecular cellular automata might be the formation of patterns below the wavelength of light.
The structure behaves like a single cell, obeying the rules of Life or whatever CA rule it's programmed to emulate. Unlike previous metacells, if a new cell has to be born, one of its neighbor metacells has to construct it starting from empty space.